


Win first, and then go to war

by Molly



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Friendship, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-04
Updated: 2012-07-04
Packaged: 2017-11-09 04:58:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,347
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/451562
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Molly/pseuds/Molly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>Natasha has a history of facing her fears.  She's not really afraid of the Hulk anymore, but Bruce Banner still makes her a little nervous.</em>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Win first, and then go to war

**Author's Note:**

> Mostly movie canon, with a bit of comics-canon sprinkled in. Many thanks to dorinda, terri, marycrawford and laurificus for beta work, and for holding my hand through the first story in a new fandom. Title stolen from a Sun-tzu quote.

**1\. Peace**

Her hand is steady, her wrist relaxed. She pulls open the screen and knocks on the door three times, loud enough to be heard through the whole house. It's small, a white clapboard matchbox alone in the world for miles, monitored by Stark Industries gadgetry in the skies above and embedded in the ground below. It's a monument to privacy, if not secrecy. A sanctuary. Piercing the bubble of empty calm is an unasked-for invasion. But she thinks it will be all right.

"Natasha," he says, opening the door. He's not surprised. "To what do I owe the pleasure? Another invitation from Fury?" He smiles slightly. "I carry a cell phone these days. You could have just called."

Unintentionally, she's fallen to attention, her hands clasped behind her back, her feet braced, her weight on her heels. It's a submissive stance, not designed for equals. Not appropriate here. Off-balance, she lets her hands fall to her sides and tries to relax. "No," she says in answer to the question, and, "Sorry," for the insult of her original pose. "I came to--"

"It's okay," Bruce says. The noncommittal line of his mouth softens into a smile. "I won't bite. Neither does _he_ ," he says, and there's no question who he's referring to. "Please, come in."

He backs off from the door, more than is strictly necessary, leaving her room to give him a wide berth. She walks past him, close enough that her arm brushes against the buttons of his shirt. Flannel, plaid, dark blue. Sleeves rolled up to the elbow. She inventories his appearance automatically, just as she'd inventoried his expression, his body language, the timbre of his voice. Everything about him is soft, vague, open. Calm. But when he moves behind her to shut the door, a line of ice traces down her spine and the hairs at the back of her neck rise against the threat. Steeling herself, she continues down the hall, her steps even. She reaches the door to the living room and turns, casually, to face him. 

He's standing by the door. When she smiles at him, he comes toward her, hands in the pockets of his jeans, his arms slack. His shoulders are low and relaxed. He waited, she realized. Waited for her to turn, before advancing. He's practically baring his throat. Suddenly, unexpectedly, she grins.

"What?" he says, raising his eyebrows.

"You," she says, and laughs. The tension in her muscles releases, ebbs away. She waves at the space between them. "This. Us."

He watches her for a moment, uncertainty clanging from every line of his body. Then he smiles back at her, ducking his head. And after another moment, he laughs, too.

"Sorry," he says. "I just..."

"Don't want to terrify me any more than absolutely necessary?"

"Yeah, that." 

"I appreciate it," she tells him, and sits down in one corner of his sofa. She puts her arm up along the back cushion and tucks one leg under her. She waves at the cushion beside her -- she's a big girl, she can take it -- but he stays where he is, hovering in the doorway. His innate courtesy, his innate _decency_ , demands it. 

Intellectually, she'd known that Fury would never leave a true risk with free run of the planet, not even watched, not even monitored by every agent he had. But all of her training, all of her skills, were meant for rational minds; they would find no traction with monsters. The Hulk -- the _other guy_ \-- couldn't be killed, couldn't be hurt, couldn't be persuaded. But it -- he -- could be _trusted_. She understands this, now. She trusts her instincts, and her instincts tell her no part of Bruce Banner is a threat.

"Can I get you something to drink?" he says finally. "I could make some coffee…" He waves vaguely toward the back of the house, where the kitchen is. "Tea? I'm sorry, I don't know what the glamorous superspy assassin set is drinking these days."

"Lemonade?" she says hopefully, and his eyes light up.

"That I can do."

She waits, listening. In the kitchen at the back of the house, he takes two glasses out of a cupboard, opens the fridge, pulls out a pitcher. Opens the freezer, pulls out a tray of ice cubes. Four in one glass, five in another. 

He pours, and comes back to the living room, glasses in hand. The lemonade is cold and just on the right side of sour. "You're a man of many talents, Dr. Banner," she says, smiling.

He smiles back. "Let's go outside. It gets warm in here in the afternoon, no matter how hard the air conditioner tries."

She follows him through the house, through the sliding glass doors from the kitchen that open onto a wide deck. She's seen it in satellite photos, of course, but that couldn't tell her that the view from this place is stunning. A wide green lawn encircles a flawless pond, almost a lake. Its surface is still as glass, and the lone finger of a long, low pier stretches out toward its center. Beyond that, hills -- rising up into higher hills, all of it thickly wooded. She can hear wind rustling in the trees nearby.

"I was thinking of something low key," he said, "under the radar, you know? But once Tony got me here and I actually saw the place, I couldn't say no."

"Stark is a terrible influence," Natasha tells him. Nothing he doesn't already know. "I can't blame you. This is…" She searches for a word to encompass it. "It's amazing."

"It's perfect," Bruce says, more an agreement than a correction. "Not that I don't love my rooms in the Tower, but sometimes the other guy needs his space."

Natasha gazes at the hills, sipping her lemonade and digesting that thought. "You've changed here?" she asks finally.

Bruce's shoulders twitch up. "Once," he admits. "It's okay. Tony was here."

She nods, looking around at the undamaged deck, the walls of the house that are still standing. "And how did that work out for you?"

"Pretty well, actually. I didn't ruin any clothes that time, at least. And he didn't really do anything. Roamed around, stomped through the lake. Pulled up a tree. Then he passed out on the pier. I think he was bored."

She thinks about it. " _That_ pier?"

He laughs. "It's reinforced with a titanium alloy. Totally Hulk-proof. Unless he's really trying."

There's a long wooden table flanked with sturdy wooden chairs, and Bruce sits in one of them. There's a laptop open in front of him, but he closes it politely and pushes it aside. She sits across from him, her glass in front of her, held in the loose circle of her fingers. Cool condensation drips down the sides, and she lifts her wet palms to her cheeks.

Bruce watches her, still ostentatiously relaxed, while she tries to introduce her reason for coming. It seems less important now. He's different, here. Not like he was in Kolkata, full of resignation and closely-banked tension. Not like he was in New York, after Loki's war ended abruptly in the rubble of Midtown -- emptied out and exhausted, bruised hope radiating out of eyes that never met anyone else's. 

"Natasha, did you come here to check up on the other guy?" Bruce asks her eventually. His voice is calm, blandly curious. "Because I kind of thought that's what the armed satellites were for."

"No, I came here to tell you something," she says. "I'm just not sure I need to, now."

He leans back in his chair, watching her while he mulls that over. "Something good?"

She thinks about it. "Something better than bad," she tells him. "At least, I think so. It's a long story. But it has an okay ending."

"Okay. Try me."

She drains her glass, sets it down on the table, and rises. "Not here," she says. "There's someplace we need to go."

 

~

 

**2\. War**

_the ball goes in the cup._

The girl has pushed herself as deep into the corner as she can, not from fear, not hiding, but because that is as far from the cup as she can get. Wedged in so tightly, she barely has room to move her arms. But it's too easy, if she's close.

She bounces the rubber ball -- pink, translucent, specked with glitter on the inside -- three times on the ground beside her right foot. _Bounce, catch. Bounce, catch. Bounce, catch._ She never looks at the ball, only at the cup. She never drops the ball. And when she throws it into the cup, she never misses.

With the third catch, she rises and throws in a graceful whirl of motion. Her hair flies out around her head in a bright red fan. The sun slants through the single high window and catches her pale, thin face, her dark eyes. Across the room, as far away from her as it can be, the blue cup swallows the ball, spins drunkenly, and falls over. The ball spills out, and the slant of the dusty floor brings it back to her. She catches it, rights the cup, and crouches back down into her corner. 

Bounce, catch.

Bounce, catch.

Bounce, catch.

The ball goes in the cup.

 

~

 

She doesn't sleep as much as they think she does. When they bring her food, she curls up in a ball on her sleeping pallet and keeps her eyelids closed. It's a little lie, a tiny secret. She holds it to herself at night, when the compound is quiet. Always guarded, always watched, this one private thing is hers.

When they bring her food, they wake her up, or think they do. She eats, and then she's allowed to leave the room. At first she wouldn't eat, but she was young and small, and they didn't care. They shrugged and took the full plates away, and it would be hours before another came. If she left it alone, they took that one away as well. She would be allowed to eat, or to starve herself, as she pleased. Eventually, she ate.

The compound is built of two parts -- the building, and the yard. The building is a long, low curve of white stone and the yard is a patch of seared brown grass between the inner walls. There's another building, just inside the high fence, small and made of brick. They keep the guns in there, guns of all shapes and sizes -- long ones, the length of a man's arm or more, and small ones that would almost fit inside her fist. Others aren't even meant to be carried; a man has to prop them up with his own body to fire. She's seen a man do that, and the thing that launched from the gun was long and thin and fletched like a fat metal arrow. She couldn't see where it landed, but she felt the ground shake when it did. 

The door to the brick building isn't locked, but she isn't allowed inside. She goes where she wants, she does what she wants, and she isn't interfered with. She isn't trusted, but she isn't feared. For most of them, she barely seems to exist.

But she doesn't touch the guns; this is the single condition of her existence. She hasn't been told, because she doesn't speak the language these men speak and in the four years she has been here, no one has tried to teach her. But the first and last time she laid her hand on cold gray metal, a man shouted at her, and slapped her, and then broke her fingers, one by one, while another man held her down. 

Only the fingers of that one hand, though. That was enough. She learned.

 

~

 

She learns. She can't read, and she can't write, but she's quick; little by little she picks up some of their words. She never speaks, but she watches, she listens. She learns that she was taken for money that her parents didn't give them. She learns that she is alive because they think someone, somewhere, some day might want her back. After a while, she knows that will never happen. She has to get free, get away, before they know it, too.

When men open the hoods of the trucks that come and go, she creeps up beside them and looks inside. She isn't punished for that. She memorizes what goes where, and what changes make the trucks start when they wouldn't start before. She notes where the keys are kept, who has them, who guards them. She spends a day sitting inside a broken one, examining the wheel and the pedals, trying to understand how to make it run. 

She sits in an unstable wooden chair across the table from a tall man with a black, bushy beard. The sun beats down. The oil on his nose and his cheeks gleams like the oil he uses on the gun. He takes it apart, piece by piece, and cleans every part of it. She watches and fixes the pieces in her mind as he puts it back together. She sits across from him every day at the same time, with the sun directly overhead, and every day he takes his gun apart. She sits on her hands to keep them from twitching toward it. Her fingers are straight and strong again, but she remembers.

She thinks she could do it: Take a gun, take a truck, run away. They don't really watch her now. They barely look at her. But she doesn't know where she is, or how far she'd have to go. The trucks need fuel, and she doesn't know where she might come by it, once she was away. She has considered just slipping away with the clothes on her back, fading away into the walls and then beyond; would they even look for her? She doesn't know. Would it be better, or worse, if they didn't? She doesn't know that, either. 

So she waits a little longer. The waiting stretches out behind and ahead of her, lengthening day by day.

 

~

 

Just before dawn, there's noise and light, screaming, orders shouted, people running. She goes into the hall, only to be shoved roughly to the floor. It's the man with the black beard, and he shouts something she doesn't understand. And then he slaps her and says, in a different language, in her language, _"Stay!"_

_Her language._

For a moment she stays where she has fallen. Not because she was ordered to, but because the man has spoken one of her words, infinitely strange in that rough and jagged voice, and yet at the same time intensely familiar. Words flood her mind, tumbling over each other, words that have always been hers. She hadn't known someone could reach in and pluck one out without her permission; steal it out of her, and hurl it back at her like a knife.

She stands up, dusts herself off, wipes away the blood that's trickled from the corner of her mouth and stares at it, a violently bright smudge across her dirty palm. And then she goes to the end of the hallway, to the door.

The sound and the silence skip across each other, gunfire and waiting and more gunfire, shouting across the empty center of the compound, and waiting again. She remembers it was quick when she was first taken; the memory is distant, like the memory of a dream she had only once, a very long time ago. She remembers that it was quick, and there was fire, and then it was over. This is different, stretching out across long minutes where nothing happens at all. 

She sees the man with the beard where he crouches behind the tire of a truck, close to the doorway that shields her. His back is to her, and she goes to the other tire, quiet as she can, the ghost of a girl she has learned to be. The line of his back seems to stretch up to the sky, his shoulders blot out the sun. He leans around the front of the truck, and the gun in his hand fires, fires, fires. On the other side of the compound, someone screams in pain.

She waits, counting. He fires again and again, then reloads, his eyes fixed on the barrels that hide the people shooting back. He fires once, and again, and there's a silence, and then he leans back round the front of the truck.

And she launches.

She throws herself against him, tiny as a bullet herself, and hits the center of his back while his weight is shifted onto his front knee. His head clears the front of the truck, and the guns answer the clear sight of him with a roar. Blood spouts from his throat like a rush of water from a faucet and he dies, still falling, his eyes fixed on hers, confused and _hurt_ and clouded. She grabs for his gun, but his hand falls into the clear, out of cover. Out of her reach.

She crouches against the tire. Silence. His gun is still cradled in his lifeless hand. She stares at it, thinking about its pieces lying cold and glistening against the tabletop, smooth and clean. Two shots, she thinks, and subtracts it from the number she's learned by heart, and the answer is _maybe enough._

She tugs at his booted foot, and the body shifts, just barely. His weight seems immense, immovable. But she wraps both of her arms around his leg and pulls, and _pulls_. Her arms burn, her fingers ache, and gunfire erupts from across the compound, bullets punching into his dead flesh over and over. At first she flinches back. But the new men can't see her, can't reach her. And her keepers have troubles of their own.

She pulls, and finally, finally, his body moves. She twists her fingers into the belt of his pants and yanks again and again. He moves, and for a second the gun moves with him, just a second, hope singing like an electric current through her limbs, one more tug, and he's with her, the dead man with the black beard and the open, empty hand.

She thinks, _I pulled too hard, that last time._ She thinks, _It's too far._ An arm's length past the front of the truck, at least. She thinks, and waits. At the end of the silence there's gunfire, and a scream from very, very nearby, and she lunges into the open.

Her fingers close around the butt of the gun. It's cold, and it's heavy -- so much heavier than she'd thought it would be. The weight startles her, keeps her out in the open a split second too long. She crouches there, unable to move as more bullets kick up dirt in a line coming toward her, zip zip zip, her eyes wide, her breath caught in her throat. 

A man shouts, one of the new men on the side that the bullets come from, and the line curves in a wild, impossible arc around her. She snatches the gun in close to her chest and runs back for the door, through the door, _inside_ to cool, to quiet, to alone, to the room with the pallet and the ball and the bright blue cup and she almost, almost makes it. 

As she passes an open doorway, a woman's hand darts out. Long, thin fingers snag in the filthy fabric of her shirt and yank her in. The woman grabs at her shoulders, shakes her, pushes her against the far wall, hissing, "You, they come for you, bring death here, for _you_ ," in a low, vicious whisper. 

Bands of pain throb in her shoulders, pain shoots up the back of her neck. Her ankle twists under her, and she falls, but she doesn't let go of the gun. She raises it, and finally the woman's eyes focus on something other than the girl, focus on the black empty eye at the end of the still, cold barrel. "Please," the woman says, in _her_ language. The woman's hand reaches out even as her body shrinks back against the wall. "Don't."

"The ball goes in the cup," the girl whispers, and fires. 

 

~

 

Silence, then sound, then silence. The girl waits beside the door, beside the body. She rests the gun on the floor, for just a moment, and gazes at the perfect round hole in the perfect pale expanse of the dead woman's forehead, and thinks, _three._ That last, pleading cringe is frozen on the woman's face, and the girl thinks it will stay that way forever. 

Gunfire again, and running. They're inside. She hears them coming. Coming for her. Bringing death, _for her_.

She stands, and goes out to meet them.

 

~

 

In an instant, they crowd the hallway, a tight mass of black uniforms, black guns. In an instant, they begin to fall. _Four, five, six,_ each sinking just where she wants it, ripping through flesh and brain and spilling out rivers of blood. She's fast, so fast, and she almost makes it to the door. 

Almost. 

There are too many; that's why the last one lives. She doesn't run out of killing; she just runs out of bullets. When the roar of her gun turns to clicks and she can hear again, the last one shouts, "Stop," holding out his hand, to her, "stop it, for God's sake, stop it, it's over! We're here, we came to get you!"

She tries to run, but the hall is narrow, and he fills most of it. He grabs her and rips the gun from her hands and throws it behind him; she lashes out with her fists, with her bitten, broken fingernails, with her teeth. She screams, rage and hate and something else, something _worse_ that hides down deep in the darkest pit of her. It's not enough.

When she finally sags, exhausted, a dead weight in his suffocating arms, she thinks, _It's over, it's over._

That's when he turns her, and pushes her greasy, matted hair out of her eyes, and says the oldest word she knows. "Natasha."

Shaking, she raises her eyes to his. She reads the death of his soldiers in his face, the men she killed, the men she liked killing.

"You're safe now," he tells her. "We came to take you home."

He takes her out of the hallway with its red-stained walls, past the bodies of his people and her people, scattered like broken toys across the floor. 

 

~

 

**3\. Truce**

They sit together in the grass between rows of tombstones, the shade thick and green around them. Every town has a cemetery, and the nearest one to Bruce's secret stronghold is no different. She lays her hand on the ground beside her, grass bunching against her palm, sharp and cool. A breeze has sprung up, sifting between them, lifting her hair away from her cheeks. 

His eyes haven't left hers, not once since she started speaking. Now, when she's run out of words, he says, "Who was he?"

She smiles. "I don't know. Sometimes I can see his face. Sometimes I recognize it, but I can never come up with a name. It doesn't matter. None of it was real."

"I don't think I understand."

"I didn't spring from Nick Fury's head fully formed," she says. "At least, I don't think I did. Before SHIELD, I was someone else. Whoever I was before that, someone stole from me when I was too young to remember anything real. Fury's doctors put me back together, his SHIELD psychologists helped me organize it." She taps at her temple with one finger. "I have a hundred unhappy childhoods in here, and they all feel as real as each other." 

He looks at her with kind eyes -- a kindness she's come to expect, but still doesn't feel she deserves. "I'm sorry," he says. "I had no idea things had been that bad for you."

"That was one of the better ones."

"That… makes me want to rip something apart," he tells her. 

"You?" she asks, smiling. "Not the other guy?"

"Some things, a guy likes to handle for himself." He looks around, his eyes skating over the polished headstones. "Why did we have to come here?"

"This is where I come to remember the things I've done. Probably done. Not here specifically," she says, "not anywhere, specifically. But the world is full of graveyards, Bruce. And I've done more than my share to fill them."

"You think you have," he starts, "but--"

"I can't know for sure what I did before Fury found me," she says. "But I can't forget what I've done since then."

"Natasha," he says gently, "I was promised a better ending than this. I hope we're coming to that part soon."

She thinks of how she found him in Kolkata, wading in the city's poor and desperate, applying what skill he could to heal instead of harm. He had red in his ledger; he wanted to wipe it out. She understands that. But she doesn't think there's any red left for him now. And now, maybe, there's a little less red in hers, too.

"We all have a monster inside us," she tells him. "You can control yours now. That's your better ending. That's what we all deserve: You, me, Stark. Clint. The others. A life outside the graveyards."

"Imperfect control," he says. "It doesn't mean I'm safe."

"You try; that's better than most people do. If I'd known you, before, I wouldn't have been afraid."

"I didn't know you, either," he points out. "You were smart to be afraid."

"Maybe," she says. "But it's different now, isn't it." Her fingers curl into the cool grass, and then she lets go, leans across the space between them and holds out her hand.

Bruce takes it. His grip is strong and warm. "Yeah," he says, smiling. "Now, I think it is."

 

~

 

.end

Feedback always welcome! :)


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